


In the 51st Sweep of the Era of Benevolent Rationality, The Dolorosa Reminds Her Castemates to Consider Decorum

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: The Era of Benevolent Rationality [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Coping, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Misunderstandings, Parent-Child Relationship, Pride and Shame, Recovery, Reference to body horror, See Kankri Run, The Dolorosa is a Survivor, The ways we hurt the ones we love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-22 00:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3708217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the cruelest joke and greatest gift when your survey of the perigee’s cavern records in conjunction with your duties at the Practical Applications Practice Department reveals the hatching of a redblooded grub, lineage unrecorded. There is a brief flurry of gossip on the cavern forums and you remind the attendants to consider decorum. It dies down.</p><p>You continue as you have and the sweeps continue to slip by and you would never have woken if an alert flag you can’t remember setting hadn’t gone off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. That which is precious is never gone so long as you remember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You did not expect to see that face again.  
> He is not your son, not your first son anyhow, but there is something in you that cannot deny him.

*

Maryam, Maryam, in the cullerium,  
How do your grubs grow?  
Subversive crimes, you’re out of time,  
And the drones all know.

Maryam, Maryam, in the cullerium  
Where are your grubs now?  
In watery hells, and death knells,  
And in the belly of the carrion crow.

*

You are the Dolorosa, though you were someone else before that, and it is likely that you are not quite the same as the troll that first earned that name.

You are a very busy Jade in the era of Benevolent Rationality.

Life has not been kind. But it has been worse.

It is the cruelest joke and greatest gift when your survey of the perigee’s cavern records in conjunction with your duties at the Practical Applications Practice Department reveals the hatching of a redblooded grub, lineage unrecorded. There is a brief flurry of gossip on the cavern forums and you remind the attendants to consider decorum. It dies down.

You very deliberately do not open any of the pictures.

You watch the very private bidding war when he reaches his second healthy perigee as a grub and are dimly relieved when a cooperative of 60 or so young Jades wins.

You continue as you have and the sweeps continue to slip by and you would never have woken if an alert flag you can’t remember setting hadn’t gone off.

It is two sweeps and some perigees later and the cooperative of Jades is putting the red grub, now a wriggler, back on the market. “To a good home, serious inquiries only.” This is not quite legal but they are Jades and still young, and will probably not be fined much.

His blood color is not widely known. He is listed in their ad only as “Warmblood, 2 sweeps and 8 perigees, smart, thoughtful, cuddly. No longer compatible with living situation.”

You watch your hands compose a reply and do not stop them. Then you order a wriggler recuperacoon.

The title for his culling transfers to you and he is delivered to your office at the RRDO’s PAP’D main branch the next night. The Jade carrying him bobs you a short courtesy, brushes his hair back, and drops a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll miss you, Sugergrub. Be good. Learn lots. Come visit me somenight.” Her voice is thick with unshed tears.

The wriggler gravely nods and formally replies, “I will miss you as well, Ms. Moxxie.” He uses the singular form of you.

She lowers him to the floor in a swift but careful move and places his carrypak beside him. She bobs you another courtesy, and turns, back straight, eyes welling. The door clicks shut behind her.

You are still seated behind your desk. The wriggler turns to you, still solemn and polite.

“Good evening, Madame. I am Kankri Maryam. I understand that you are to be my new culler. How do you wish me to address you?”

It is like being stabbed and gasping, only to wake.

*

You find yourself kneeling before him, fingers tipping his chin up to see his face clearly. It is almost that of your beloved child, still padded with wriggler fat, the same set to the eyes, the same nose, the same steady gaze, unthreatening horns, the fine half curls of wriggler hair. You drink in the sight of him and start to notice the differences, the slightly higher cheekbones, the more delicate sweep of his brows, the cut of his ears, taken altogether, well within the general range of warmblood, but taken apart, the differences just slightly seadweller.

There has never been another like your lost child. From what blessed or bedeviled fertile ground did this redblooded child spring?

You could lie to yourself and call him a spontaneous mutation, move on, but that wouldn’t explain his resemblance to your own. How long have you slept in bureaucracy while someone smuggled a bit of your beloved child away? Have there been other generations, iterations, all hidden from the Empire, from the Summonerists, from the Benevolent Rationality, from you? You do not believe such could have been so completely hidden. You do not know what happened to the Disciple, only that she escaped. She would be old now, if she still lives.

You remember a few seadwellers at the edge of your Signless’s followers, more than a few trolls who were not so troll-like as the Empress would prefer. You remember treating them warily, that he treated them warmly, always open to betrayal, open hands, open back, open heart. Yet you do not believe that he would have lain with any of them. You do not remember them all, some timid, some arrogant but hungry for the truths he spoke, but none of them stand out. You cannot believe that you would not have known.

And yet, the colder the blood, the longer the brooder can store viable slurry without inducing a gestation cycle or flush. A seadweller would explain the resemblance with a slight change, and the time difference between his death and this one’s egg. But who?

You have been silent for a long time, but this child has not moved.

He is still under your fingers and gaze, calm, not frozen as prey under an adult troll. He studies you back, and waits.

“I am the Dolorosa. You may call me what you wish.”

You still have a full night of administerrorist work ahead. You open his educational logs, cue up six hours of schoolfeeding and their accompanying tests, and he settles into one of your deliberately uncomfortable visitor chairs without complaint.

Three hours pass and you almost forget that he is there. He shifts occasionally, but your mind is already used to the tiny purrbeast rasp of his breathing. You have made a note of it and scheduled a full exam and lab work up in your calendar for tomorrow night.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes, Kankri?”

“I have completed the assigned reading and testing. What would you like me to do?”

“A moment please, let me review your answers.” You had slipped a few higher level questions in among the standard testing. His answers are less then you’d expect of your much older students, but clearly thought out, precisely worded. He does not have the prerequisite schoolfeedings or access to the data forums and inculcation that they do. What he does have is an observant mind and an intuitive grasp of things unarticulated in the schoolfeedings. You wonder if the young cooperative had any idea how much he studied them. He is a tiny bit magnificent.

“What did you think of them?”

The two of you speak until dawn threatens and you make no further progress in your work that night, but you cannot bring yourself to care.

You carry him home under a sunshield blanket, a warm heavy weight of trust dozing on your shoulder, and you settle him into the tiny wriggler-sized recuperacoon, an extravagance your first son only seldom knew.

You had thought your bloodpusher only a reliquary of ashes. And it had suited you to be cold at heart, and diamond, and spade.

An auspistice best serves her leaves with the cold hands of logic, and you have been attendant upon both the Teal Legislancerists and the Jade Caballistas since before the Summoner’s Revolution, dancing the delicate mechanical steps of mediation. You were not unsuccessful. The Jade and Teal Consortium now holds Alternia, its fleet, an assortment of Empire era colonies, and contracts and negotiations with newer trade partners. The needs of the many are not always the needs of the few, but it is better than valuing it the other way around. You had thought that this was sufficient.

You were wrong, and you are waking up. 


	2. This is how we turn away from one another

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation from two sides.

“Madam, have I displeased you in some way?”

Two sweeps ago, when you began your duties at PAP’D, the Dolorosa, your culler and your patron, had granted you the right to call her by her hatchname in private. You cannot force yourself to call her Rosa now, surely you must have lost that privilege with whatever failure you committed to be so punished now.

“You are not my first son,” she says and for a moment all you hear is ‘ _you are not my son_ ’ and the racing of your heart. You stare at her and your throat fills with the bubbling of your thoughts and fears, the crawling horror that waits mere nights ahead, and for the first time in your very accurate memory you cannot speak.

*

“You are not my first son,” you start, and immediately regret it, stop, try to find the right words. He is _still_ before you, that attentive, almost eerie state in which he perceives and absorbs everything, consumes books and netfeeds like a fish through water, learns people more than they ever guess, cuts through their masks and posturing like a bird through air. You wonder what he sees when he looks at you. You wonder what your first son would think were he to see you now and know your shame. You cannot continue. You look away.

*

She turns from you and you know that you can expect no help from this quarter, your last refuge. There will be no last minute stay of the knife. You have been judged, and failed, but that does not mean you cannot ask why. You will never be an adult, you will never be free of her, she whom you held above all others but Meenah, whose judgment you judged worthwhile, whose regard you coveted, perhaps foolishly. She can be free of you, you suppose, it would not be outside her rights as your custodian to find you a new one, now that you will never outgrow cullee status. _Offered, mutant warmblood, seven sweeps and a perigee, slightly foxed and reproductively unviable. Tidy, interfaces well with the public, has a future in retail. No longer compatible with living situation._

Your voice trembles and you are shamed anew that you cannot steady it. You have held hands and wiped brows and told strangers that there is no shame in allowing it. They were far stronger than you.

“I did not expect to be first in your regard, but I had hoped to earn your regard, have worked for it, whatever my failings. Will you not tell me what flaw was unacceptable?”

She will not look at you, she cannot bear to see you.

*

“It is not your fault,” you promise.

How can you tell him that you traded away his adulthood for _more important things_ , things he might have agreed to even, but now has no choice? It is better for it to be immutable, non-negotiable. It is not his failing, but your own. There are those who worry at your relationship, who fear that even as the Sufferer ultimately upset the Empress’s rule, his scion, your second protégé, will similarly upset the status quo.

They do not know Kankri, they do not know your child who aches for others and lives on knowledge like it is air and water and meat. Once you might have let him escape to the librariquary to live happily among the likeminded and the dusty shelves, but you took the other path and his mind has already started to illuminate questions about trolls that no one has asked, or at least not in such a manner as to catch others in the grasp of his quest for answers.

You know he is the best choice, not only for you, but for PAP’D and the RRDO, maybe for the future of all trolls when it comes down to it, and those who worry that you are consolidating power will only allow him to be designated your heir in this manner. You cannot sacrifice your wriggler wellbeing reforms. You cannot sacrifice the future of the RRDO which may well be that of all trolls. You cannot allow Kankri to be driven from the place where his brilliant mind is already plumbing the depths of the inefficiencies and erroneous suppositions that ages of tradition and skewed science have accrued.

Kankri is not a revolutionary, not in the way that the Consortium fears. You do not tell them that your first son was also not a revolutionary, except in that he would have lived.

*

“It is not your fault,” she tries to placate you, as if that makes it better. ‘It is not your fault’ means that the failing was inherent in your mutated flesh, that your mind was not sufficient, that _you need not worry yourself_ after it. It is an accusation, but not one she wants to make to you. You will be better than you have been. You will not fail again. 


End file.
